From VCR to CD-ROM: A New Way of Viewing

When James W. Stigler first thought about examining math teaching by
studying videotapes of classes in the United States, Germany, and
Japan, "it really was impossible," the UCLA professor recalled.

Anyone with a videocassette player knows how difficult it would be
to try to analyze key events or draw broad comparisons while
fast-forwarding and rewinding through hundreds of hours of
videotapes.

Nevertheless, Mr. Stigler got a contract from the U.S. Department of
Education's National Center for Education Statistics for just such a
study. "After I got the money," he recalled matter-of-factly, "I found
out it was really impossible."

The agreement called for the videotaping of representative national
samples of 8th grade classrooms as part of the Third International
Mathematics and Science Study.

A difficult task, but not really impossible, said Lois Peak, the
Education Department's TIMSS project director. She said with a chuckle
that Mr. Stigler's comment merely reflected his humility.

Yet surmounting the technological problems involved in the
three-year, $2 million study was by no means guaranteed, Mr. Stigler
said in an interview here in his office at the University of
California, Los Angeles. When he began the project, the technology did
not exist to match his vision for managing, on a computer, the large
amounts of data the study would collect.

Three and a half years later, that vision is contained on a digital
computer database--millions of videotaped images of 231 separate
lessons from math classrooms throughout the three countries.

Instant Access

The software, designed specifically for the project, allows a viewer
to access any given moment of any lesson and view it on a computer
monitor alongside a written transcript keyed precisely to that section
of the tape.

The system differs from off-the-shelf CD-roms, which carry someone
else's ideal configuration of images and text, because the user can
manipulate the video and text to create a customized document.

Using this technology, Mr. Stigler's researchers can quickly access
video images of American teachers giving a geometry lesson, then follow
it immediately with a similar lesson from Japan.

This has enabled them to learn, for example, that 8th grade teachers
in Japan give a coherent lesson tightly focused on one mathematical
concept, while their U.S. counterparts tend to introduce many topics at
a time.

The technology, Mr. Stigler said, has applications far beyond the
world of education research. A lawyer could search, say, a videotaped
deposition for any use of the word "car," then annotate that scene with
questions or comments.

This breakthrough offers many advantages. ones and zeros read by a
computer, the files won't wear out with repeated playing. And with
instantaneous access to any point on any of the videos, the researchers
and others can perform much more sophisticated analyses than would have
been possible with conventional videotape.

"We really couldn't have done this study without this technology,"
Mr. Stigler said.

The birth and early life of the software proved arduous. As of late
1993, as the researchers prepared to collect all their data, they had
experimented with hardware and software combinations without real
success. One option, they knew, would have been to wait and let the
technology catch up with them.

But Mr. Stigler would have none of that. "I said, 'We've got to do
it now. We can't take no for an answer.'"

So they hung on to "the bleeding edge of technology," Mr. Stigler
said, trying to work out the bugs in the system.

Money for the software project also became an issue. So with the
blessing of the Education Department, Mr. Stigler and others founded a
private company, Digital LAVA Inc., in 1995 to raise money to continue
the software project.

Many Applications

So far, the company has sunk about $2 million into the project,
compared with the $100,000 the department put in, Mr. Stigler said. The
company, located in a small office suite just a few blocks south of the
UCLA campus, has attracted other users of video who want to buy the
software, but Digital lava has yet to turn a profit.

The main database software, known as vPrism, runs on Apple Macintosh
systems and is priced at $4,498 per copy for educational institutions
and nonprofit organizations. As of next month, a desktop spinoff will
be available that will sell for $198 for nonprofits and will run on
personal computers with Windows operating systems, said Tom Stigler,
the company's vice president for sales and marketing and the brother of
James Stigler.

The expense may be a stumbling block for some education researchers,
cautioned Harold W. Stevenson, a University of Michigan psychologist
and a colleague of Mr. Stigler's.

But he and other experts acknowledge that the technology has
potential.

"Methodologically, this is going to be a whole new direction in our
ability to understand and quantify phenomena," Ms. Peak of the NCES
said.

Mary Lindquist, a professor of mathematics education at Columbus
State University in Columbus, Ga., agreed. The digital database, she
said, "gives us real power to look at classroom instruction in many
different ways with many different eyes over a long period of
time."